Thursday, October 27, 2016

Last March our volunteers commemorated the opening of
the Cos Cob Park by going to our archives and highlighting here an interview
conducted in 1989 with Gertrude O’Donnell Riska. Her interview is largely a
retelling of the time her father, Lewis Grant O’Donnell, had overall
responsibility for the Cos Cob Power Plant from 1923 until his retirement in
1940, long before the plant was demolished in 2001.

Gertrude O'Donnell Riska

Much has transpired since last year. This past summer
the Cos Cob Park won the 2016 Sustainability ACE Award and the 2016
Environmental ACE Award of Merit from the Connecticut Society of Civil
Engineers (CSCE). In September, on the fifteenth anniversary of September 11,
2001, the town hosted a remembrance ceremony at the new 9/11 memorial in the park.

September 11 Memorial, Cos Cob Park

But before these events, on March 18, 2016, just days
before the park’s first anniversary, Gertrude O’Donnell Riska died, surrounded
by family in her Cos Cob home.

Given these events it is fitting that we turn again
to her interview, and the writer responsible for this year’s visit is a new Oral
History Project volunteer, Olivia Luntz, a Greenwich High School senior. We are
pleased and honored to publish her first blog entry below.

Cos Cob Park Today

By

Olivia Luntz

Walking through
Cos Cob Park today, one could never imagine the huge significance the piece of
land once held. When walking on the fields, hearing kids laugh on the
playground, or skipping stones into the harbor, one would not think the now
peaceful place was once essential for all train movement in New England. A
century ago the site of Cos Cob Park held “the world’s first experimental
station to use alternating current electrification to run trains.”

The unique
location of the site was essential for the power plant, as the area has access
to fresh and salt water, as well as access for barges, and proximity to New
Haven and New York. Originally the plant supplied power to run trains from Long
Island to New Haven and also gave power to feeder branches in Danbury, New
Canaan, and White Plains. This huge undertaking occurred in the heart of Cos
Cob and was staffed by fewer than 150 men, working around the clock. For the
Chief of the Power Plant, Lewis Grant O’Donnell, the responsibility to provide
Connecticut trains with power required many sacrifices. His daughter, Gertrude
Riska, describes it as “a twenty-four hour job, whether he was there or at
home….During emergency calls he would have to go at night.” The power plant
opened in 1906 and O’Donnell was there from the start. He was eventually
promoted to chief electrical engineer in 1923, a position he held until he
retired in 1940, after working for the plant for 34 years.

Lewis Grant O'Donnell

Riska’s
descriptions paint a vivid picture of the power plant. It was built four
stories down into bedrock, with six-foot thick support pillars, and walls of
two-foot thick reinforced concrete, while the floor was four feet thick. The
turbine room was five to six stories high, with six to eight turbines the size
of a house sitting in a row, and she recalls, “The minute you stepped inside
you were engulfed in heat and noise.” The generators between the turbines produced
the electricity. If one of the huge wheels inside of one of the turbines ever
broke loose, which had happened in other power plants, “it would cut a path of
destruction for ten miles…to the other side of Port Chester and destroy
everything in its path.”

On a more
cheerful note, the plant also housed hidden treasures. For example, on the wall
where the workers’ timecards were kept there was a beautiful clock and above
the clock was a mural that O’Donnell had painted himself in 1938 after several
accidents at the factory. The mural was six feet long and three feet high and
depicted a racetrack. It featured cutouts of horses, which were movable from
the start line to the finish line. “Each department was represented by a
racehorse, and they advanced or retreated according to their careless accidents
for the month. Among the horses was a donkey named Carelessness. He represented the
lowest score. And the winning department got awards.” The poem above the mural
read “Our racehorse Safety who is fast on his feet/Can beat old Carlessness whenever they meet/So give him your support--obey all the rules/By taking no chances when working with tools.” Over the next seven years the competition between
all of the departments was so intense that no accidents occurred at the plant.
Riska believes that the mural and clock have since been taken to the
Smithsonian. She recalls that the Smithsonian also claimed the plant’s
switchboard “with its gleaming brass dials and rows and rows of gauges and
needles….It was beautiful….Some of those dials dated back to nineteen hundred
and they were still working when the plant closed [in 1987].”

Racehorse painting above the clock

Along with
caring for his workers’ safety, O’Donnell also fought to keep his workers’ jobs
during the Great Depression. When informed that twenty of his men had to be
laid off, he was distraught. All of his workers had children and there were no
other jobs available. He asked if they would take a cut in pay to keep everyone
working, but many who had been working at the plant for years claimed seniority
and asked O’Donnell to fire the newer workers. O’Donnell, however, had a
different strategy in mind. The next day he re-gathered the workers, and
standing at the top of the stairs, he announced, “I have a hat in my hand which
contains slips of paper with each man’s name on it…the first twenty names
[pulled out] are the men that will be laid off.” As none of the workers wanted
to rely on luck, they all agreed to the pay cut and no one was laid off.
O’Donnell saw these workers as his family and could not let any of them go.

According to
Riska, the most exciting events at the plant were the several times a year when
a deep sea diver would go down to clean the flumes. Barnacles growing on the
sides of pipes would, over time, block the flow of water to the plant. “The
diver sat on an old wooden bench, the huge suit was put on him…then the heavy
over boots each weighing fifty pounds. That’s so when he got down to water, he
wouldn’t float; he would be upright. Then, lastly, the headpiece and the
breastplate….At this point, the tender would start the air flowing, by using
this little hand pump. The diver would shuffle—he couldn’t walk because the
shoes were too heavy—over about ten feet to the open manhole. And he did look
like Frankenstein.” From there, as Riska explained it, he would wave up and
disappear into his work. The task of scraping all of the barnacles off took a
few days.

Other important
events at the plant included the 1938 hurricane, in which the tide rose so
quickly and so forcefully that it swept up the flume, short-circuited the
plant, and flooded the lower floors. O’Donnell did not leave the plant for a
week, until he was able to get the trains running again. Later, during World
War Two, the plant was guarded by F.B.I agents, because if the plant were bombed,
there would be no train movement in or out of New England. Additionally, an armed
guard protected the plant from a shack under the Riverside railroad bridge. His
job was to stand, rifle in hand, whenever a train came along.

Power Plant Boiler Room

Outside of the
power plant O’Donnell also made a major impact on the Cos Cob community. He was
one of the founders of the Cos Cob Fire Department and built the first pumper
for the fire patrol. He also drew the plans for the present firehouse and
raised the money to build the firehouse. O’Donnell also used the burned coal
residue from the plant to fill in a swamp in Cos Cob, which is now part of the
Cos Cob School playground, and created a mini-park beside the Cos Cob
firehouse. “My father had established many flower beds where beautiful giant flowers
thrived in a mixture of fly ash and soil. The paths were neat and edged with
whitewashed stones. At Christmas time there were at least ten Christmas trees,
ablaze with colored lights, a lovely sight for the people to see from the
trains.”

O’Donnell
retired as chief electrical engineer in 1940 and the power station was
decommissioned in 1987. Although the plant was added to the National Register
of Historic Places in 1990, it was demolished in 2001, after a local and
national debate. If you ever find yourself in Cos Cob Park today remember that
what is now a beautiful place for children to play was once capable of powering
trains across New England. More importantly, however, remember Lewis Grant O’Donnell and the lessons that we could
learn from his life, such as his dedication to his job and community and his
commitment to the wellbeing and safety of all of those around him.

Gertrude O’Donnell’s
interview, “Chief of the Power Plant,” 1992, is available through the Greenwich
Oral History Project office located on the lower level of the Greenwich library
or in the reference area on the first floor.